Techmeme
October 2, 2025, 5:05 PM

Top News

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: OpenAI completed a secondary share sale that let staff sell ~$6.6B at a $500B valuation, making it the world's most valuable startup, ahead of SpaceX  —  OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation, propelling …
Reuters:
Source: OpenAI employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price  —  OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500 billion, following a deal in which current and former employees sold …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars  —  Within moments of opening OpenAI's new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS.
New York Times:
As Sora clips go viral, users express awe and delight as others warn about IP theft and that its Cameos could lead to new kinds of misinformation and scams  —  This week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios.
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Meta unveils communities on Threads, starting with 100+ dedicated spaces for casual conversations around topics like basketball, television, and K-pop music  —  Instagram Threads, Meta's X rival that now has over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a new feature …
Bloomberg:
A Google executive and sources: a ransomware group that says it has Cl0p ties is sending extortion emails, claiming it stole data from Oracle's E-Business Suite  —  Executives and technology departments at large organizations are being extorted by a notorious ransomware group that claims …
Charles Rollet / Business Insider:
Perplexity is making its AI browser Comet, previously $200/month with Perplexity Max, free, with rate limits; Perplexity says Comet has millions on its waitlist  —  Follow Charles Rollet … Saved  —  Add us on  — Perplexity is making its $200-a-month browser free for everyone.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch:
Anthropic hires former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as chief architect  —  Anthropic has a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil.  Patil started at the company earlier this week …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Red Hat confirms a breach of a GitLab instance after the extortion group Crimson Collective claimed to have stolen ~570GB of data from 28K internal repositories  —  Correction: After publishing, Red Hat confirmed that it was a breach of one of its GitLab instances, and not GitHub.  Title and story updated.
Google Developers Blog:
Google says Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, is now generally available and supports more aspect ratios, priced at $0.039/image and $30/1M output tokens  —  Our state-of-the-art image generation and editing model which has captured the imagination of the world, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 🍌 …
Financial Times:
Asahi says most of its 30 factories in Japan have not operated since September 29 following a cyberattack, leaving Japan with just days of Asahi Super Dry stock  —  Vast majority of factories of nation's most popular beer have stopped work this week  —  Japan is just a few days away …
Antonio Regalado / MIT Technology Review:
Microsoft researchers say AI models can be used to design toxins that evade biosecurity systems used to screen DNA orders for potential biothreats  —  A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a “zero day” vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.
More: Science, Financial Times, Microsoft, and NPR
X: @satyanadellaLinkedIn: Satya NadellaBluesky: @rhaccart and @skepticcircuit
Maya Dharampal-Hornby / Sifted:
NYC-based Dash0, which offers AI agents to monitor and troubleshoot cloud, app, and infrastructure issues, raised a $35M Series A, taking its funding to $44.5M  —  The platform has over 300 paying customers including Starling and Porsche  —  Dash0, an AI-native observability platform …
Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Sources: Universal Music and Warner Music are nearing landmark AI licensing deals with companies like Google, Spotify, ElevenLabs, Stability AI, Suno, and Udio  —  Universal and Warner seek payment structure similar to streaming as more disruption looms  —  Universal Music and Warner Music …

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Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: